The Honourable Company by John Keay

Author:John Keay [Keay, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Non-Fiction, Business
ISBN: 9780025611696
Google: sPQNAQAAMAAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 834381
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1991-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

ii

In deciding against the forcible occupation of Divi Island the Madras Council had taken into consideration the extent and vulnerability of its other territorial commitments. Besides Fort St David (Cuddalore) and Masulipatnam, the president in Madras was heir to the Company’s often forgotten and always mismanaged settlements in the Indonesian archipelago. And it was from there in 1719, during the week before the final decision on Divi, that reports began to reach the Madras Council of another of those dismal affrays which had so often punctured the Company’s self-assurance in the past.

Known simply – if confusingly – as ‘the West Coast’, all that now remained of the spice-laden dreams of the Middletons and Jourdain was a place called York Fort, otherwise Benkulen, in south-west Sumatra, plus its several outposts scattered along 300 miles of adjacent but harbour-less shoreline. Following the loss of trading rights at Bantam (Java) in 1683, it was to Sumatra and Benkulen that the English had removed. They had been there ever since. As in the days of James Lancaster, they bought what they could in the way of Sumatran pepper and sold what they could in the way of Indian cottons. The pattern of trade had scarcely changed in more than a century.

Neither, unfortunately, had its volume. To increase and regulate the pepper supply, various schemes were tried including the establishment of plantations for which, as in St Helena, convicts and slaves were imported. But Benkulen remained a trial both to the Company’s directors and to its servants. Rarely did the pepper yield even cover the standing costs of the place; the climate was even more poisonous than that of Bombay; and the opportunities for private trade were decidedly limited. It was not a popular destination. Only the disgraced and the truly desperate found their way to ‘the West Coast’.

Such a one had been Joseph Collet, the future President of Madras, when he had launched his Eastern career by accepting the governorship of Benkulen in 1712. One may judge of his plight by his need to borrow not only the surety money customarily demanded by the Company of its senior agents, but also the wherewithal to pay for his outfit plus a few hundred pounds ‘venture’ money with which to launch his private trade. He was in fact a bankrupt who was further beset by the misfortune of having numerous female dependants plus an over-scrupulous conscience. The former expected him to provide for them, the latter insisted that he honour even debts from which the courts had discharged him. Collet was at his wits’ end. As a born-again Baptist he could hardly contemplate suicide; but he could contemplate Fort York, regarded by many as an equally certain way of putting an end to things.

Happily for the righteous, Collet’s great gamble paid off. Confounding predictions, he invested his trading capital so shrewdly that within three years he had satisfied his creditors. He was also able to relieve his impoverished daughters by sending home sumptuous presents – a slave girl to one, a length of chintz to another, and in time substantial dowries for all.

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